Are Independent Mac Software Developers getting the shaft?

I enjoyed MacHeist.Â I thought it was a fun “game”, and enjoyed trying (usually in vain) to figure the Heists out on my own.Â One of the things that I enjoyed the most about it was how supportive of the independent Mac development community it was.Â If it’s one thing we like here at Apple Gazette, it’s indy developers (just look at how many Software Spotlights we run). However, after reading this post on Daring Fireball this morning, I can’t help but question if MacHeist is really helping the indy dev community, or hurting it.Â First, let me be clear, that John Gruber’s post does assume a few things (for example the cut that some of the top tier developers are getting)…but those things would be in FAVOR of the developers not against them.Â If the information in his post IS true…then MacHeist may not be the champion of indy developers they claim to be…if these numbers are true, it seems to be more like exploitation.

From the article:

Respectable agents or managers take no more than a 15 percent cut of their clientsâ€™ revenue, and usually not more than 10 percent. Thatâ€™s true in sports, itâ€™s true for authors, and itâ€™s true for entertainers. MacHeistâ€™s role isnâ€™t that of an agent or manager; the closest traditional description I can think of is that of a promoter. But the basic analogy holds, in that theyâ€™re ostensibly looking after the interests of â€œthe talentâ€; a 10-15 percent cut of the profits sounds about right to me â€” which in the case of MacHeistâ€™s 8-10 member ensemble of developers would make MacHeistâ€™s fair share roughly equivalent to that of one of the developers.

But those numbers are based on the sales numbers at this writing, two days into a weeklong promotion. MacHeist is on pace to take a far larger share of the actual profits than the average developer in their bundle. Consider the distribution of profits when and if sales meet the levels for unlocking NewsFire and TextMate:

(To compute this table, I estimated that David Watanabe (NewsFire) and Allan Odgaard would be getting the same â€œmore equalâ€ $12,500 payment that I believe Delicious Monster is getting. I have no information to back this guess up; if I had to wager Iâ€™d bet theyâ€™re making less, but it seems more fair to guess high than low. I also treated John Casasanta as a regular developer.)

What this table makes clear is that because these payments are for a flat fee, as sales goes up, additional profits all go to the MacHeist organizers. If sales reach the level to unlock TextMate, MacHeist will keep more than 70 percent of the total profit, and the average individual developer will get less than 3 percent. I repeat: 70 percent of the profit would go to the MacHeist team â€” almost 25 times more money than the average profit of a developer in the bundle, and more than double the profit of all 10 developers combined.

Consider this: How much worse for one of these developers would it be for you to pirate a copy of their app than to obtain a legitimate license through this bundle? They donâ€™t get any extra money either way, because theyâ€™re getting the same flat payment from MacHeist whether you buy the bundle or not. And if you do buy the bundle, theyâ€™re on the hook for providing you with technical support.

I hope that we hear from the MacHeist team about this in the near future.

Comments

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Our firm is accepting bids for a custom software package. Project: 64-bit, Animated user interface, written in Objective-C 2.0 in Cocoa with detailed documenting throughout program.

We will market and sale project. Currently there is no mac software available servicing our intended market.

That being said, a non-disclosure and no-compete agreement is required before detailed information of project is given.

We are interested in a fixed price bid. Our project is well-defined with detailed specifications. However, communication with several other companies to integrate project with other companies and transfer data both ways via the internet is required.

Project must integrate with iChat, iCal, Mail 3, address book, office 2008 and Quick books to name a few.

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[…] Well – turns out he was fake. A creation of the guys behind MacHeist, the online game (contest, activity…whatever you want to call it) that caused a bit of controversy last year as well. After the game was over, and numbers started coming out about it, it looked, to some, like Mac Heist may not have been terribly fair or helpful to the indy developers who gave serious (and sometimes ridiculous) discounts on their software. You can read more about that here. […]